


see us all as lonely fires

by hungryghosts



Category: Vampire Diaries (TV)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-05-07
Updated: 2010-05-07
Packaged: 2017-10-26 04:02:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,292
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/278473
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hungryghosts/pseuds/hungryghosts
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>she wonders when her life became a twisted nursery rhyme without a happy ending.</p>
            </blockquote>





	see us all as lonely fires

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this before seeing the latest episode, so here's hoping it's not horribly AU. In any case, the girls and their friendships with each other are one of my favorite parts of the show and I love Bonnie, so this happened.

When Bonnie Bennett falls apart, the world does the same. Bonnie doesn’t (shouldn’t) fall apart. She’s solid, reliable, and _Bonnie_. Her life is dull, the slots neatly aligning with no space left for the fantastic or the horrible.

But it does happen and this is how it goes: She leaves. She’s scared and she leaves.

  
“I’m going to stay with my mom for a while.”

“Bonnie –”

“I can’t – I think I just need to not be here right now.”

“Okay,” Elena says slowly – but not resentfully or angrily, because that’s Elena, empathetic to a fault. The understanding in Elena’s voice only breaks Bonnie more; it coils around the tension in her chest and squeezes. She can’t breathe, she can’t think, she can’t _do_ this anymore.

Bonnie wants to open her mouth and purge the words and death and magic because it’s all the same to her now. Instead, she bites her lip and hugs her best friend. It feels like a lie.

  
She’s too young for this.

She’s too young for this, but she can safely divide her life into a Before and After. In the Before, she’s happy. In the Middle, she’s a witch, she’s possessed by one of her many (many) crazy ancestors, her best friend’s dating a vampire, Grams is dead.

In the After, she can feel the pit in her stomach stretch and push upward, the stupid grinding of hate and frustration and disappointment and rage and sadness.

Bonnie’s afraid of where the After is going to lead her.

Bonnie sleeps, eats, and doesn’t think about the books of spells and words she can’t understand. She feels frayed. She’s trying clumsily to put herself back together again, but the jagged edges don’t fit.

(Humpty Dumpty had a great fall. All the king’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t put Humpty together again. She wonders when her life became a twisted nursery rhyme without a happy ending.)

  
At first, Elena calls every day. Bonnie can tell even before her phone goes off, not because of her powers but because Bonnie _knows_ Elena, a sixth sense grown out of a childhood constantly spent together. That should be a comfort, she tells herself, something familiar, except that’s not hers anymore either – not since Stefan snatched it for himself with his stories of cruel vampire girls and kindly witches.

Bonnie and Elena? Nothing more than crisscrossing family trees, the next Katherine and Emily, intertwined over and over. It’s history repeating and Bonnie knows how all the textbooks go: the same mistakes, the same lessons that are never learned.

And so she ignores Elena’s calls, because if she answers she’ll either hold it all in or let it all tumble out, _he’s a vampire, stay the hell away from him, why are you so okay with this_. But she would rather have the silence than the truth. Each day she presses “ignore” and wishes it was that easy. _You’re a coward_ , she thinks bitterly.

When Elena stops calling, Bonnie’s so relieved, it drowns out the guilt.

  
Bonnie can’t focus. Where there was once magic and delight, there’s now only hate and regret. She wants to cry, but the tears, like her magic, won’t come. She rips up the pillows in her room in frustration and wishes it could go back to happiness and floating feathers in the air.

Bonnie’s mother sees the massacre later that night. “What happened to your pillows?” she asks with concern.

“Nothing,” Bonnie shrugs and flops down on her bed sullenly. She turns away because she can’t bear the look on her mother’s face.

  
“How are you?”

“Okay.” _I’ve lost my powers and Grams died for nothing and Elena is dating a vampire. How about you?_

“When are you coming back?”

Bonnie sighs. “I don’t know, Caroline.” She hesitates and then she takes the plunge, “How’s Elena?”

“You’re not talking to her?” Caroline sounds surprised.

“It’s been a while.” Bonnie leaves it at a half-truth, ignoring the ringing sound her hollow words make. _Guess what, Caroline? I’m a witch and Damon and Stefan are vampires and I’m so, so sorry that I’ve been keeping this from you_. She wants to pull Caroline into the darkness with her, wants to shatter Caroline’s definitions of normal and happy, satisfy the cruelty that’s steadily carving a hole inside her stomach.

Instead, Bonnie keeps lying to her. Caroline doesn’t read much into it. They’ve all been lying to Caroline forever and Bonnie knows that this counts as normal. She hopes that it also counts as kind.

  
Bonnie tries again a couple of days after the first conversation with Caroline. She takes out her phone, taps a message to Elena. _Hey_. She stares at the one word, it feels stupid, and not enough. Not enough to bridge this horrible gap and she deletes it angrily.

She tries again the day after that and then the day after that.

By the fifth day, Bonnie just stops trying.

  
The magic comes back to her. She doesn’t know how, but she’s thankful. She needs something solid in her life, and her powers, shifty and dangerous, are the closest things she can find.

Bonnie pores over her grandmother’s books, tossing the words and chants into the air. Each time, it takes something out of her, but it becomes easier and easier to make that sacrifice. She takes the barbed feelings in her chest, untwists and unbends them, channels it into her magic. She’s a witch. She’s Bonnie Bennett and she’s a witch.

The words taste bitter and sharp. They pierce into her as she wraps herself around them, and she finds that she likes the pain.

  
The phone calls from Caroline become a regular occurrence and Bonnie greedily clasps onto the lifeline to normalcy.

“Seriously, Bonnie, when are you coming back?”

“When I can.” For once, this is the truth.

“Bonnie, I love you and I don’t want to push you –”

Bonnie snorts because this is _Caroline_.

“ – but you need to _come back_. Elena is driving me insane.”

Caroline starts chattering about Matt and how he had looked at her and what does it _mean_. Bonnie stops listening when Caroline launches into her inventory of Matt’s clothes and the symbolism behind his blue hoodie, and looks back at the book on her lap. It’s heavy, the words and shadows weighing it down. She traces the figures on the pages with her fingertips. Bonnie can see and feel them go on forever, stretching around her in a cocoon that’s as weak as it strong. The magic swirls like smoke, it echoes ghosts and death. It’d be easy to lose herself in there, she thinks. A part of her knows she already has.

When Caroline mentions Stefan, Bonnie feels cold. She tries not to think of fire and dust.

(She doesn’t notice when the corner of the page starts burning.)

  
Bonnie’s not sure where their friendship – hers and Elena’s, hers and Caroline’s – trailed off the script into a horror story of vampires and witches and everything in between, and when that everything in between grew bigger and bigger until she couldn’t see her friends anymore. She’s trying not to think of them on different sides, but her mind’s already declared war and is marking out the lines.

And it hurts, because the thing is, Elena is still her _best friend_.

Elena loves Stefan. But Bonnie? She loves Elena too. She loves Elena, she loves Caroline. This is her family. This is what the facts are.

And Bonnie’s not letting some guy, any guy, even one who could break her as easily as he breathes, get in between their friendship.

She won’t.

  
This becomes her life. Each day, she gets up, grieves a little less and hates a little more.


End file.
